Gatekeepers of Extermination: SS Camp Physicians and Their Scope of Action
Abstract
The role of camp physicians of the Waffen-SS (“Armed SS,” military branch of the Nazi Party’s Schutzstaffel) in the implementation of the Holocaust has been the subject of limited research, even though they occupied a key position in the extermination process. From 1943 and 1944 onward, SS camp physicians made the individual medical decisions on whether each prisoner was fit for work or was immediately subjected to extermination, not only at the Auschwitz labor and extermination camp but also in pure labor camps like Buchenwald and Dachau. This was due to a functional change in the concentration camp system during World War II, where the selection of prisoners, which had previously been carried out by nonmedical SS camp staff, became a main task of the medical camp staff. The initiative to transfer sole responsibility for the selections came from the physicians themselves and was influenced by structural racism, sociobiologically oriented medical expertise, and pure economic rationality. It can be seen as a further radicalization of the decision making practiced until then in the murder of the sick. However, there was a far-reaching scope of action within the hierarchical structures of the Waffen-SS medical service on both the macro and micro levels. But what can this teach us for medical practice today? The historical experience of the Holocaust and Nazi medicine can provide a moral compass for physicians to be sensitive to the potential for abuse of power and ethical dilemmas inherent in medicine. Thus, the lessons from the Holocaust could be a starting point for reflecting on the value of human life in the modern economized and highly hierarchical medical sector.
Gatekeepers of Extermination: SS Camp Physicians and Their Scope of Action
Nico Biermanns, MEd
History of Medicine
Abstract: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M23-0362
Huneke wins grant to research lesbians in the Third Reich
Samuel Clowes Huneke, Assistant Professor, History and Art History, has been awarded a Sharon Abramson Research Grant from the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University. The award will enable him to complete research for his forthcoming book on lesbians in Nazi Germany.
For many decades after the end of World War II, the fates of queer women were ignored. Because female homosexuality had not been criminalized explicitly, historians long argued that lesbians were not persecuted by the Nazi regime.
In contrast, Huneke’s book, which is under advanced contract with Aevo-University of Toronto Press, argues that queer women under Nazism faced forms of persecution shaped by misogyny as well as anti-gay animus. The book further contends that in spite of this persecution, queer women sought to carve out spaces of community and tolerance for themselves and that their tenacity in the face of fascism can serve as a model for queer politics in our own time.
The Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University awards Sharon Abramson Research Grants annually to support research related to the Holocaust.
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